"They don't want good. They don't love God and they don't want God. They don't love religion and they don't want religion, and they won't have it, but we will not let them win. They have no chance against us. They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It's an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder."
100% on brand - pure projection. Because every Trump accusation is a confession.
Believe it or not, once upon a time, the GOP wasn't filled with gutless, callous, soulless, self-dealing plutocratic freaks.
Ah, the good old days.
Never try to base an economy on an ideology, and never try to create a government from an economic system.
Business is business, government is government, religion is religion, and even though they each have some legit influence on the others, for the most part, they all have to stay in their own goddamned lanes.
Some peddlers of the conventional wisdom have been saying Trump's foray into Venezuela means trouble for Putin.
Heather Cox Richardson says otherwise, kinda.
This may be a good time to reiterate: Nobody knows - everybody guesses. And from what we've been seeing with this new cluster fuck in Venezuela, not even the people who know what's going on, know what's going on.
When we start to see some of the medium and longer term results, then we'll know more, but as always, it's very likely we'll never know the whole story.
So anyway, I've always found that Richardson sees things pretty clearly. Thank god for the history nerds.
A few facts:
It costs about 7 million dollars every day to deploy a carrier group and 15,000 troops
In the last 40 years, over $50 Trillion have moved from the bottom 90% of Americans up to the top 1%
Republicans are again totally unconcerned with the skyrocketing deficit and debt
Take away education and healthcare, and you can move all the way over from serving to ruling
Socialism is about politics, which is about economics.
The rich and powerful don't want poor people to vote, because they inevitably vote for roads and water systems and schools and hospitals and unions - and the only way you pay for all that stuff is through taxes and profit sharing -
What Trump is doing to get around the law (The Antideficiency Act) is a big deal. It stinks of a standard authoritarian move to grab more power by ignoring - ie: disbanding - the legislature.
(Notice how Mike Johnson has conveniently sidelined The House)
Changing the path of a political culture - especially one that's been moving in a particular direction for a good 50 years - is like steering a tectonic plate.
Heather makes a great point here. The Trump regime wouldn't be so frenetic if they weren't very worried.
Nobody likes the gerrymandering crap except the people who gain power &/or stay in power because of it.
It's easy to understand how so many people are so fed up with the system. They don't believe their taking part in it matters because they don't believe they have a real say in what happens - that it's all for show.
My problem with that is:
That's how the Power-Grubbers need us to think, so that's what I'm in this fight to resist.
First off, Trump doesn't give a fuck about anything but collecting Power Coupons (aka: dollars), so turning assholes like Stephen Miller loose to fuck over brown people is a good way to keep the rest of us occupied while Trump sells $hitcoins and bibles and shoes and perfumes and whatever else gets him and his henchmen paid.
But the point is that this country is being turned into a vast conglomerate of privatized government functions, staffed by ideological loyalists, and fueled by contract prison labor.
Toward that end, we need to be desensitized about what happens to 'other people' so we can be kept in line thru the constant threat of becoming one of those other people ourselves.
